In French, the word coller means "to glue" and it's from this word that we get the modern art term collage. Unlike traditional art, which focuses on creating a single object like a painting or a sculpture, a collage is a combination of multiple objects into a single work of art.

As a serious art form, collages did not truly emerge until the early 1900s, after the start of the Modernist movement in art and culture. Through the lens of Modernism, everything in society was up for reexamination, breaking away from convention and tradition. This led to collages becoming a major feature in the work of artists like Pablo Picasso, who added found objects like guitar strings and newspaper clippings onto the canvases o his paintings. Collages would become much more prominent around the 1960s with the rise of Pop Art, owing to the work of artists like Tom Wesselmann and Jane Frank.

There are as many styles of collage as they are materials to use in such works. Some, like Picasso, piece together found objects with the painted canvas. Others, like Kurt Schwitters, reassembled pieces of wood into artistic forms and shapes. And there are still more ways of producing tasteful collages through photomontages, cutting up and pasting together different photographs into a more varied whole.

For an example of modern collage, we can consider the work of French artist Laure Prouvost. Her creations take traditional collage and blend them together with film and art installations. In 2013, she put together a video installation piece known as Farfromwords (although the full title is Farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells). This award-winning installation features a 72-foot-long curving canvas, which is covered in black-and-white photographs and widescreen TVs. Playing on each screen are clips of berries, women swimming, birds chirping, and fish eating, all to the tune of the artist's voiceovers and commentary. Provost considers this piece a reflection of her experiences in Italy, where she stayed for six months.

Today, we live in a world where information comes to us in rapid streams and is often pieced together from a multitude of sources. In this way, collages continue to have a lasting appeal and will likely have an audience in years to come.

You can find brilliant collages, both old and new, in museums like the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Image by Joanna Poe on Flickr